“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson
We were left with the executorship of the union, which we received intact and on which we were trusted to continue to build upon. But we allowed it to decay and dwindle because we forgot about the brotherhood of union. The alliance that got us higher wages to purchase the homes, cars, and the ability to send our children to college. We left behind the harmony that would have informed, protected and cultivated us even when our consciousness waned. That amalgam that was our leadership and activism. We put aside our strength, our conviction, and with it our demand for justice and the ability to shape legislation from the streets. We left behind the very essence that made us soar. But most important , we left behind the memory of those who fought and died so that we [union] may exist.
I point out these enigmas to expose the possibilities. We have come a long way in material advances, but lagged behind spiritually and morally, so we are losing ground on our gains. We have failed to make a brotherhood. We let our materialism, prejudices and immaturity uplift the oppressor [ Corporate America] and gave oppression momentum and power. Now we must transform our thinking and renew our ideals. Our allegiance must not be to the powerful but to the deserved.
Union helped build a great productive system, which made us the richest nation. But we failed to protect the balance needed to keep a democracy, instead we have allowed it to become a plutocracy. This type of governance has taken us from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.This causes us to make a living instead of a life. We have allowed them [corporate executives] to live a life of gross materialism and exploitation, taking necessity from the masses to give luxury to the classes. They have sold us a form of regime through the idea of free trade [free market], when we knew that nothing is free. Even freedom ain’t free. When we did not speak out against exploitation of overseas laborers, a new form of slavery, we now find ourselves being the exploited by corporate globalization. They now take our taxes in the form of subsidies and 20 year tax abatements, to fund the shipment of our jobs overseas and to pay for lobbyist to convince our Congress and Senate to write new laws to support it. We slept while an alliance was building between the world’s largest corporations and the most powerful governments. This covenant, supported by the privilege of money, is allowing the alliance to begin to incorporate the world’s national economies into one, borderless global economy for the sole use and purpose of the mega-corporations to freely move goods and money throughout the world with maximum profits and no governmental regulations. This leaves us, our children, our grandchildren, vulnerable to exploitation and propaganda because this pact allowed ownership of our entire media. We abandoned our standards because we had new [diversions] position and things. We have now found that selfishness is blinding. We must now begin to learn so that we can teach. We can’t fix it if we don’t know what and how it happened.
We begin with first the acknowledgement that corporations are now ruling the world. In the name of globalization, corporations are maneuvering power from governments who are responsible for the public good and toward a small group of corporations and financial institutions with a single agenda, short-term financial gain.
We sit in a constant state of agitation and confusion because those same corporations own the media and therefore the message. They bombard us continually with interpretations of the occurrence through the eyes of the power holder. The message to us is that government regulations are the source of our distress and globalization [free trade] is the answer and it is a historical inevitability and a blessing to our human family. In fact, these are fabrications to justify their insatiable greed. If we had paid attention, remembered history and England’s Tudor Plan, we would have said no to free trade. We must have a domestic industrial base.
The mid-term elections are the most important, because we are electing the people who make laws. Do you wonder why your friends and co-workers don’t know that they have received the largest middle-class tax cuts in American History? Why aren’t we aware that this resulted in a creation of over 3 millions jobs? The answer is MEDIA! They report to you that President Obama’s plan has failed to create jobs when in fact it has…..probably tens of millions. But they failed to inform the public that thanks to corporate exploitation and greed, those millions of jobs were created mostly in China.They fail to tell you the truth because those same corporations who shifts your jobs overseas, are the same monies that own the media.
From the 1920’s when radio was king, until President Ronald Reagan in 1987, federal communications law required a certain amount of “public service” programming from television and radio stations as a condition of retaining their broadcast licenses from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In exchange for the media owner’s license, they had to serve the public interest first. At renewal time, public hearings on the license renewal were held. The public could vote against the renewal.
They had public service announcements (PSAs) for local nonprofit groups, charities and community calendars. They also had to abide by the Fairness Doctrine, which made it compulsory for the owners to air diverse viewpoints on issues of controversy. During election campaigns, the broadcaster had to give equal airtime to rival candidates [the Equal Time Rule].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
The most important proof of providing a public service , meeting the requirements of the Fairness Doctrine, was by broadcasting the news. Local, national, and international news produced by real professional journalists. News didn’t make money or get huge ratings like entertainment television did, but it was more important. It drew tens of millions of watchers and radio listeners, and that made all the other money-making things possible even though the news lost money due to the expense of producing the news.
Once Ronald Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, we got the rise of hate-speech talk radio and President Clinton gave us the Telecommunications Act in 1996, which further deregulated the broadcast industry. The benefit that they believe they gave us is mindless entertainment. So we now take for granted that the media is obliged to give us what we want to entertain us instead of what we need to inform us. Investigative journalism that would have exposed corporate transgressions vanished. In its place we have news operations promoting lies and distortions.We no longer get, demand or expect real news…the kind that citizens in a democracy need to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
This keeps the public from managing their own government, because the information is narrow, inflexible and controlled. The public must have the means to participate in a meaningful way in the management of their own governance. In order for that to occur, the means of information must be open and free.
This is the way in which we are now being trained to work in the service of the masters [the people who own the society], while they assault organizations (unions) because organizations undermines their commitment to control the public mind. The Creel Committee of 1917 [engineering of consent] already proved to them that public relations work. It succeeded and grew through the 1920s and became so extreme that it was investigated by Congressional committees as we entered the 1930s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information
http://web.utk.edu/~glenn/CreelCommittee.html
In the 1930s the nation again found itself in a quagmire, the great depression and historic labor organizing. Labor won it’s largest legislative victory, the right to organize, with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. To the “special class”, the “Deweyites”, this meant that democracy was misfunctioning. “The bewildered herd” was winning legislative victories. It was becoming possible for people to organize. That was not supposed to happen, they had public relations which was supposed to diminish the thinking of the mindless public. The people were suppose to be fragmented and insulated. “If they organize they might become more than just spectators. They might actually participate in the political arena. That is threatening to [corporate] dominance. So they set out to ensure that this would be the last legislative victory for labor and the end of this democratic deviation of popular organization. IT WORKED! That was the last legislative victory for labor. The unions capacity to act began its steadfast decline. The corporate money worked through the public relations industry.
The industry got a chance to try it out on the Steel strike in Johnstown Pennsylvania in 1937. They presented the strikers as disrupters and harmful to the public, which makes them against the public interest. They painted the strikers as agitators and against American idealism and not wanting to work with them (corporate executives). They convinced the public that corporate executives and the person who cleans the floors all have the same interest and could work together if it were not for the rabble-rousers (strikers). IT WORKED! In fact it worked so well they later named it the “Mohawk Valley formula”. They used this scientific method of breaking strikes over and over again while they effectively shaped public opinion by using empty concepts [slogans] like Americanism, yellow ribbons or support our troops. The concept is completely vacuous. Who could be against it. Its like asking someone if they support the people of New York. Can you say yes or no? It’s not even a question. It intentionally doesn’t mean anything. The point of propaganda is to keep the people from thinking about the issue. They must keep “the bewildered herd” distracted with empty slogans, violent movies and the Playoffs, etc… In the meantime we have the steady decline of union which in turn is decaying a working class (the middle-class) culture that came as a result of the birth of unions. It has been replaced by a corporate run society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_Valley_formula
http://www.reference.com/browse/Mohawk_Valley_formula
We need to go back in order to move forward. We need intellectual information that is essential to the health and strength of our democracy. We need educated and informed citizens to participate in our democratic institutions, elections and unions, and we’re not going to get there if we allow them to continue to dumb down the news and continue to give people only what they want, mindless entertainment (ex: Maury, reality shows, etc..) and none of what they and society need.
Now that the Supreme Court has allowed a corporation to be a person, the money faucet is wide open, producing ads through the Chamber of Commerce, to influence the mid-term elections. They are now able to do this without disclosing where the money is from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
They are now boldly announcing their plans to get rid of unions, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance and in the process privatize social security and repeal the Healthcare reform bill. They are now mentioning doing away with free public schools.
They are now declaring that they know that we will not come out and vote in the mid-term elections, because we haven’t done so in 20 years. They believe that again the “Creel Committee” has worked. Propaganda has convinced the “bewildered herd” to put back in office the same mindset that got us here in the first place, so that they can continue their agenda.
I will continue to address the history and direction of the media because it is relevant to our rebuilding union and the middle-class. But for now I must make clear the importance and magnitude that our vote on November 2, 2010, will have. The consequences of not being counted is not only our livelihood but our DEMOCRACY!
Penny McQuaig
our union voices 